Wednesday,
September 30, 2009
12:15 PM
Sage Chapel

Buzz Spector, Dean, College and Graduate School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis and Prof. Kevin Ernste, Dept. of Music, Cornell University

Reprise -- Crenshaw Stories: Narratives of Community

Crenshaw Stories has been adapted for presentation at Sage Chapel from the many stories told to Spector by people living near the site of his 1994-7 public art project, the design of the Crenshaw Station on the Metro Green Line of the new Los Angeles rapid transit system. These stories have been painted onto the station walls, where they are read by thousands of travelers daily. Spector says of the project: "Transportation systems are not just means of moving passengers--they are metaphors of the cultural and spiritual links between peoples. Crenshaw Stories was designed to stress the connections between us that may be found in the stories we tell about our lives. If we can better understand each other's stories, we'll be better able to appreciate the connections between us all."

Kevin Ernste is a composer, performer, and teacher of composition and electronic music at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center. He did graduate work in Music Composition at the Eastman School of Music (MA, PhD). Recently he was the Acting Director and lecturer at the Eastman Computer Music Center and Co-director of the ImageMovementSound festival. He was the 2007 and 2008 composer in residence at the Alexandria Guitar festival in Alexandria VA.

Kevin Ernste's recent music includes a work for guitarist Kenneth Meyer (gtr. and electronic sounds, 2006), saxophonist Randall Hall, a piece for viola with electronic sounds for John Graham performed on Mr. Graham's May 2004 China tour (Beijing, Wuhan, Xiamen, Hong Kong), as well as at the Aspen Summer Music Festival, a piece for solo piano and tape narration for Fang-Tzu Liu called Long Path, recently performed in the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan, and a commission celebrating the work of Pulitzer prize winning former Poet Laureate Rita Dove.

He is currently composing a number of new works, one for guitarist Nathan Fisher to be premiered in Cairo, Egypt, one in collaboration with artist Buzz Spector based on Spector's 1992 book and train station installation "Crenshaw Stories", a new piece for the Janus Trio to be premiered in Spring 2010, and a half-evening-length piece for viola, percussion, and prepared piano based on the events of April 4th 1968 and the poetry of Aeschylus.

Kevin Ernste's awards include a Whitford L. Huff Award, two Belle Gitelman Awards, a Howard Hanson Ensemble Prize, a McCurdy Prize, an American Music grant, and the Ralph Jackno Scholarship. A recent CD including his piece To Be Neither Proud Nor Ashamed appears on the Innova label (CD 660). His music has been performed nationally and internationally, with recent and upcoming concerts in Holland, Taiwan, Singapore, mainland China, Hong Kong, England, Cuba, California, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Virginia, Oregon, New Jersey, and New York, including institutions such as Cornell, Princeton, Syracuse, and others.

Franklin "Buzz" Spector, professor and former chair of the Department of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., is now dean of the College and Graduate School of Art, both part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

An internationally recognized artist and critical writer, Spector works in a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, printmaking, book arts and installation. He joined the Department of Art in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University in 2001 and served as chair of the department until 2007. Prior, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, joining the faculty as professor of art in 1994 and serving as head of the painting program from 1997-2001.

Spector has held visiting professorships and lectureships at a number of universities and schools of art including the University of California's campuses at Los Angeles, Riverside and Santa Barbara; California State University, Fullerton; Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif.; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

A native of Chicago, Spector received a bachelor's degree in art from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1972 and a master of fine arts degree from the Committee of Art and Design at the University of Chicago in 1978, combining studies in art and philosophy.

For "Crenshaw Stories" (1998), commissioned for a new rapid transit station in South Central Los Angeles, Spector talked with residents about the neighborhood and its history, collected their stories, and had local sign painters letter the tiles in the Crenshaw Station underpass. "We all lettered the stories in 11 different languages, all of them spoken in the area," Spector says.

Spector's work makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and as object, and concerns the relationships among public history, individual memory and perception. He has issued a number of artists' books and editions since the mid-1970s, including "Time Square," a letterpress limited-edition book published in 2007 by Pyracantha Press at Arizona State University in Tempe.

In addition to altering books in the name of art, Spector has produced a few of his own, including "The Book Maker's Desire" (1995, Umbrella Press), a collection of essays on the art of the book; and "Details: closed to open," presenting photographic details in images from the Swarthmore Peace Collection.

Other publications include "Details: closed to open" (2001), an artist's book of photographic details from images in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, an archive of historical and contemporary information related to peace and social justice, and "Beautiful Scenes: Selections from the Cranbrook Archives" (1998).

Spector's work has been shown in numerous museums and galleries, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Penn., and the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato, Italy.

Spector is a co-founder of WhiteWalls, a journal of art and language first published in 1977 at the University of Chicago. He served as the journal's editor until 1987; since then, he has written extensively on topics in contemporary art and culture for American Craft, Artforum, Art Issues, Dialogue, Exposure, New Art Examiner and Visions.

He is the author of "The Book Maker's Desire" (1995), critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists' books, and numerous exhibition catalogue essays including "Dieter Roth" (1999, University of Iowa Museum of Art) and "Ann Hamilton: Sao Paulo-Seattle" (1992, University of Washington Press).

The recipient of several awards and fellowships, Spector was honored with an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1991), a Visual Artist's Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council (1988) and three fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991, 1985 and 1982).